What Are Legacy Board Games?

A Legacy Game is going to be similar to a campaign game in some ways. You play the game over several sessions or sittings with an unfolding story, or at least tracking everything that you are doing, whether you win or lose and things like that.

But different than a campaign game you make changes to the game. This could be placing stickers on a board game, adding rules to the rule book, or tearing up cards. The idea is that every decision you make in a legacy game is going to be permanent and persistent. For example, in Risk Legacy you can blow up a country or area. In Pandemic Legacy your character can die or gain scars. And these don’t ever go away, or in the case of a blown up country ever come back.

The Issue

So you can see how that issue would start to present itself. If the game is played over a campaign style set number of games, and you can never go back and play it again, is it a good value?

The Case Against

Let’s use Pandemic Legacy as an example. In Pandemic Legacy you play through a year, that is 12 games, but if you lose in a month, you play through it again. So you are looking at 12 to 24 games that you can play. With that you are placing stickers on the board, rule book, and cards. When you are done with your year of games, you have a map that isn’t all that playable. You could maybe get down to base Pandemic, but there’d be extra things thrown in, and extra powers for characters that you’d need to ignore.

So is it worth it to buy, when it was first out, a $70 game? I could break down the math, say 12 games, four players, if you have that many, and an hour a game, so 48 hours of game time/entertainment time, which is a pretty cheap value for entertainment. Better than the movies. But once you are done, you are done, compared to other board games out there, or even base Pandemic, which is cheaper and you can play forever, the price per hour value will be higher.

The Case For

On the flip side, what case could be made for it. Firstly, because you are putting things down permanently on the board, decisions matter more. I don’t love it when it feels like there is a wrong decision, but decisions carry more weight when you are adding a scar to a character, or have a city yet again have an outbreak and the panic level rises yet again.

Plus, there is the unfolding story element of the game. Not all legacy board games have a ton of a story to them, but it provides an opportunity to play with story more. Now, campaign games can do that as well, but with less consequences, or consequences in different ways. For a legacy game, the story can unfold and change up the world completely or the board completely as you play. It might be hard to get into a city in Pandemic because of too many outbreaks in a location that is unique to you.

Are Legacy Board Games Good?

Legacy board games aren’t going to be for everyone, but generally, I do think that they are good. The reason for that is that they provide a different gaming experience than almost any other game out there. The experience they can bring because you make permanent choices adds that extra weight to a game like Pandemic that could get played out if you play it often enough.

I also think that the concern about how many times you can play a legacy game is less of an issue than most people think. Let me dive into that a bit more. Most people play a game, 4-10 times a year. Not play games, but just play a given game in their collection a limited number of times. Now, that might be different for you, and it is for everyone. Some games are played more, others are played less. But it’s rare for games to get played a ton of times if you have a few games in your collection.

So a legacy game provides 12 plays, on the lower end that is more than you’ll play most games in a year. That might be more than you play a game in three years. Let’s say you have Twilight Imperium and you can play that once or twice a year, that’s at minimum 6 to 12 years to equal the amount you’d play Pandemic Legacy likely in a year. Plus some legacy games offer modes to play post the legacy campaign.

Three Recommendations

I’ve played a number of legacy games, and some work better for me, others won’t make the list, Seafall, because it isn’t a great legacy game. So let’s talk about some legacy games that you could maybe checkout. If you are interested, these could be a good spot to jump into the mechanic and see if it is one for you.

My City

This one is pretty easy to recommend because it is a cheap game and a simple game. It is a tile laying game where you score points and get rewards with how well you build out your town each game. Compared to a lot of legacy games, this is much cheaper. You can probably find My City for about $20 right now, and the game is an easy one to get into.

It is a game with less story in it. It gives reasons for what you are adding to the rules throughout the game. But that story is very loose and it’s mainly just a tile laying game. But it adds in more things as you go, so the game feels like it develops and progresses over time. And you can play it once the game is done, granted with slightly different rules.

Pandemic Legacy Season 1

I’ve talked a lot about Pandemic Legacy and I’d be remiss to put it on the list. I think that Pandemic Legacy Season 1 is a good jumping in point to the series of games. There is Season 2 and Season 0 as well, but Pandemic Legacy Season 1 is the most like Pandemic and easy to pick up.

This has more of a story going throughout it and creates some very fun and interesting moments in it. There is even a very nice twist that happens as the game goes along. I won’t spoil when or where that is in the game, but it is interesting. It takes the Pandemic system and makes it so much more thematic as you play without changing up the game that much.

Aeon’s End Legacy

Finally, Aeon’s End Legacy. This is one that I played on Malts and Meeples and is a game that I really enjoy. It is a cooperative deck building game where you don’t shuffle the cards in the deck. Which I find fun because you can set-up some things as you go, or at least attempt to. Plus the different nemesis that you face offer a nice variety to the game.

Aeon’s End Legacy has less story than Pandemic Legacy, but more than My City. Where Aeon’s End Legacy really shines, though, is as a jumping in point for Aeon’s End. It takes a game that is not too complex, makes it a bit simpler and then slowly adds back in the complexity of the game.

Final Thoughts on Legacy Board Games

I don’t believe that everyone needs to have them or play them. But I also do not believe that because a game says legacy someone should immediately reject it. Often times the experiences in a legacy game are going to be more interesting or unique than those in other games that are one off. And they are something that can’t be replicated in that style of game. And as I talked about before, it’d probably be playing a game more often than people play most of their games.

But if you only own a few games and you play those few games all the time, I totally get not wanting to own a legacy game. They would reach the point where you wouldn’t be playing them anymore and it wouldn’t provide the value for you long term.

Though, I believe that story and experience element of the game does make it worthwhile. It is like a movie in a lot of ways. You go to the theater and you see a movie and hopefully you remember that experience and story. The same can be said for a legacy board game, you are paying for that memory of the story and experience, even if it’s not something you can play again. I do find it odd when people don’t bat an eye at going to a movie but a legacy game is something that is so obscene to them. The experience is not that different except the game is cheaper per hour of fun.

What is your favorite legacy board game? Or do you avoid them, if so, what is the reason?

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But, I wanted to go back to this game and write an updated TableTopTakes on it, because the two experiences were very different, but similar. I’ll explain what I mean in a second, but first, let’s talk about the game itself.

Pandemic Legacy Season 1 is based off of the base game Pandemic. In Pandemic you are a group from the CDC based out of Atlanta. You are trying to stop the spread of four diseases, red, blue, yellow, and black, before you run out of time, run out of disease cubes, or have too many outbreaks. At the start of Pandemic Legacy Season 1, this is what you are still doing. However, because it’s a legacy game, the game evolves over time. New rules are added, cards are added or removed from the decks, characters change, and stickers are added to the board. At the end of Pandemic Legacy, you end up with your own copy of the game that is unique from anyone else’s experience based off of a number of different things. But along with changing up rules, etc. there is also a story element that leads you through the game as you find out what is happening around the world and with the diseases. This story is pretty straight forward and you are always going to hit the same beats at the same time.

This story is where I want to start talking about the two experiences that I had. Mainly, because, the story doesn’t change. Even though the boards look radically different between the two games, the story, progressed in a very similar way. You hit the same beats at the same time, and while I got to skip a little part or two along the way because I was more prepared, the story as a whole didn’t change. Now, is that a bad thing about the game? Is it bad because there is a limited number of times you can play through because you remember the story? It was three years, I believe, between plays for me, and I remembered a fair amount of the story. Maybe not when it was going to happen in the game, but I remembered that it happened. It isn’t a great thing about this game, however, playing through the second time, the experience was still very enjoyable. It was different though as I wasn’t always waited with baited breath for the next bit of story.

Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (and Season 2 for that matter) really come down to being so much of an experience. Even when you know the story, you are still wrapped up in what you know is going to be coming. Plus, the tension that you can get even from the base game if the epidemics come up just wrong is still strong in this game, if not stronger. The game builds up to the point where you feel like if something wrong happens, it’s going to get out of control fast. And I don’t think that you lose that experience either playing it a second time or playing it solo. I think had my first play been solo, I might have done better than we did but probably a few more rules would have been missed. I also think that the tension might have been lower the other way around because while I wouldn’t have spoiled anything, I could have lead people in the right direction and had more group input. Or I would have had to have sat back and that might have caused more tension, because I could see wrong choices or poor choices being made.

One big difference between the two games was that the first time through, there were four players. When I played solo, I was the only player and I controlled two characters. Controlling two characters is pretty easy, and it worked well. You’re able to coordinate a bit better than with four characters because you aren’t sending your characters away at random. I also tried not to play on “easy mode” which would be using the Medic and the Dispatcher who are a powerful character combination. Even with that, I would say that coordinating two characters yourself is notably easier than playing with four people each controlling a single character. That’s not a downside to either experience, but the game dynamic changes with the number of players you have, and in a game with tough decisions, both ways can sometimes be an advantage.

With all of that said, do I think I could play it a third time? And I think that I probably could. I’m not sure I could sit down and do it now, it would seem like something I just finished and know too much about, because that’s an accurate statement. But, sometime down the line, I could see coming back to it with the right group, especially if you’re introducing it to new players. To kind of take the role of the rules expert who can run the set-up and keep track of the book keeping aspect while sitting back and enjoying the game or helping as needed in decision making. It would be a good way to introduce a more complicated idea of a game, though the mechanics are pretty straight forward, to a group of people who might not play as many games.

Overall, it was a really enjoyable experience going through the game again. I think I had basically as much fun the second time as I did the first time, and when it’s just me playing it, it’s easier to coordinate it getting done. Pandemic Legacy Season 1 is a game that can benefit from having a tighter timeline, though, since it’s based off of months, you can certainly do what we did the first time and try and play once a month. If you are looking for a campaign style game that is very accessible, I think that Pandemic Legacy is a great option. And while you can’t play the game again when you are done with it, the price point is good and the hours of entertainment and the experience are fairly valued.

Overall Grade: A
Gamer Grade: A-
Casual Grade: A

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